Coatings & Surface Treatments
Your spring’s visible surfaces represent the most critical line of defense against premature failure and degraded performance of your spring application. Spring surface coatings and treatments are secondary operations that apply a protective coating to the outer surfaces of the spring.
Century Spring is proud to offer a wide range of surface treatments engineered to increase your spring's reliability in its intended use environment. Our typical passivation and plating surface treatments provide reliable corrosion protection and wear resistance in the most demanding environments. Our specialized plating materials can also optimize your spring's electrical conductivity.
We also offer dye surface treatments to alter the spring's color or appearance for part identification. Lastly, we provide specialized spring surface treatment options such as shot peening and passivation which add corrosion and fatigue resistance to your spring in the most demanding applications.
Custom Coating Services
Century Spring offers best-in-class spring manufacturing technologies, bringing precision and quality to all aspects of spring design. These capabilities enable us to deliver durable, reliable products across many custom sizes and styles.
Specifically, we offer many surface coating and treatment options, allowing you to specify and shop coating types such as passivation, plating material, and dyeing options.
You can gain a sense of available secondary operations by shopping our stock spring catalog:
Passivation
Passivation is a surface treatment that alters the atomic structure of the metal. It involves applying a chemical treatment to the spring that removes free Iron atoms. The process induces the bonding of free Iron atoms with free oxygen in the air, creating an “oxide” layer on the spring surfaces.
This makes the spring's treated surfaces “passive” or non-reactive to chemical contaminates, providing a robust protective layer against corrosive mediums that would otherwise cause corrosion. The thickness of this protective layer is comparatively tiny, ranging from 40 to 120 nano inches, but passivation achieves a protective layer without adding additional material to the surface. Century Spring passivates with both Nitric and Citric acid to passivation specifications AMS2700 and ASTM A967
Plating
In contrast to passivation, spring plating is a surface treatment option that adds a thin coating layer of additional, dissimilar material to the spring's exposed surfaces. This is commonly done through electroplating or chemical processes. However, other options, such as hot-dip galvanization or thermal spraying, are other common plating techniques.
Plating treatments generally add thickness to the surface of the metal, meaning spring dimensions like wire diameter increase slightly. For example, electroplating may add 0.1 to 2.0 micro inches in thickness to the part's surface, depending on the material and application. Compared to passivation, plating creates a much thicker protective surface layer, which may be desirable for corrosive operating environments.
We offer numerous plating options such as Zinc (ASTMB633), Nickel, Cadmium, Black Oxide, Power Coat, Gold, and Silver. We even offer a dry film lubricant plating surface treatment, which minimizes friction and spring wear.
Dyeing
We also offer custom dye coatings to customize the reflectance and color of your spring. Spring dyeing is typically done to aid component identification.
Sometimes, springs or other machine components are color-coded for mass production environments to ensure the correct spring is placed into the correct assembly every time, which is vital if a specific spring is critical for safety. Customizable dye coatings help production workers easily distinguish it from other parts.
Other Surface Treatments
We also offer additional surface treatment options, such as shot peening and deburring.
Shot peening involves the repeated high-speed impact of the spring surfaces with small spherical balls, called shots. This effect produces a shallow layer of indentations on the surface of the spring, inducing a small layer of compressive stress onto the surface, increasing the spring's durability, especially under cyclic loading.
Deburring is a standard process for springs that removes sharp edges and protrusions that remain after manufacturing. It provides smooth surfaces on the spring to ease assembly efforts and ensure its smooth operation under loading within assemblies.
Industries Served
Your design application determines your spring’s surface treatment and coating requirements.
For example, many aerospace and automotive components feature springs with electroplated coatings, while passivated springs are commonly found in medical devices such as orthopedic implants and surgical instruments.
We have many available surface treatments across many spring types, which will optimize performance in the most demanding loading environments.
For more information on application-specific springs and secondary operations, check out our Industry Pages:
Why Choose Century Spring
Our Commitment to Quality and Service
Century Spring is a quality-first, ISO 9001 and AS9100D certified, industry-leading spring supplier specializing in stock and custom springs. We are the most trusted name in spring manufacturing and offer rapid delivery on over 40,000+ in-stock designs available to ship today. We are committed to getting products to you as quickly as possible because we understand your design scheduling constraints.
Our dedicated custom spring development and customer support teams help you navigate critical design criteria such as size, material, and surface treatment to find your application's optimal spring solution.
Our experienced product engineers, knowledgeable product quality team, and skilled manufacturing personnel always deliver the highest quality products to you faster than our domestic and international competitors. All our products comply with all International Traffic and Arms Regulations (ITAR), Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) regulations, REACH, California Prop. 65, and Conflict Minerals Regulations .
Our springs are always made in the USA.
What Our Customers Are Saying
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Get In Touch
Contact Information
Contact us directly today, and let our experts resolve all your technical and sales questions. We can also guide you through all our available coated springs for every spring type and material.
If you need immediate assistance, you can always speak directly with our team on our dedicated customer service line at 800-237-5225.
Request a Quote
If you can’t find the spring and surface treatment you need in our catalog, you can always Request a Custom Quotation and partner with us to determine the best custom spring and finish options suited to your application.
We will follow up with a custom recommendation and resolve any additional follow-up questions you may have.
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Click the button below to request a quote and start your journey with Century Spring.